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The Premier Address For All Things Graphic DesignWed, 11 Feb 2015 16:04:57 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Where Graffiti Belongs: Stephen Powers’s A Love Letter to the Cityhttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/stephen-powers-a-love-letter-to-the-city/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/stephen-powers-a-love-letter-to-the-city/#commentsTue, 22 Jul 2014 18:05:52 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=13075These sentiments almost seem like commercial slogans, but they don’t have a corporate sponsor. Powers believes that his work helps the community, that he is advertising for a product and that product is love. Perhaps that’s why the police in Philadelphia simply offered ESPO and his crew a “Good luck, yo” while they painted a wall during a snowstorm.

Page 128Photo credit: Dave Villorente

Prior to becoming a full time artist, Powers worked as editor and publisher for his own magazine, On the Go, where among other successes he antagonized the rap group Onyx and located the reclusive and weird Old Dirty Bastard. In 1999 he helped create an unflattering portrait of Mayor Guliani for a political protest, and was described as a “noodge and self-promoter” by The New York Times for his efforts. Less than ten years later, Powers would paint graffiti on a Fulbright scholarship in Ireland, be approached to paint murals around the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn and would be celebrated as a working artist by the same newspaper that mocked him in 1999. If you live in a major city, you’ve probably walked by his work more than once, or maybe you’ve seen his lettering on album artwork.*

A Love Letter to the CityCover

A Love Letter to the City, Powers’s new book, documents the rise of an artist who treats graffiti as a career; getting to know people in the field, defending his ideas, finding ways to stand out from his peers, and refining his technique. Starting out with the story of ESPO’s graffiti in Philadelphia, it talks about his move to New York, convincing business owners in Coney Island to use his hand-painted signs instead of cheap vinyl lettering. He gets paid—barely, in the Coney Island tradition. But more importantly, he gets his name out as a working sign painter.

ESPO and the Coney Island bumper carsPhoto credit: Lula Rae

Like any good designer, Powers gets to know his clients, in this case, communities. He describes being on friendly terms with other graffiti artists whose work he’s painted over, he talks with people who don’t always like his message. “Hug me like I hug the block” he writes on a brick wall in Philadelphia, and he’s challenged by a passerby: “You can’t say that—that’s what drug dealers say.” Powers asks them: “Why can’t drug dealers be loved?”

His response is the kind that every designer and artist should be ready with: it’s bold, it challenges the client, it has a different perspective. At one point in the book Powers describes how “Graffiti is putting a name on something that doesn’t belong to you. But when you put the names of the community on something, then it belongs to everybody.” It’s refreshing to skip the “Is it art?” graffiti debate and focus more on content and tone. Powers’s artwork tells the story of a class struggle just as well as Banksy, he just has a different take on how that struggle looks.

His mural in Johannesburg is an awe-inspiring “MaMa” written over and over in different colors on a six-story building, each “M” being a story in height. While it’s a homage to the idea of “Mama Africa”, it also works as a tribute to mothers. Seeing the building before, without the mural, you can’t believe it’s the same city.

But there are times when the photography in A Love Letter to the City cannot do the work justice. The Brooklyn Macy’s garage is a good example of this. Because the mural covers all sides of a very large structure, it’s hard to properly document it. But reading the story of how hard it was to create that mural, seeing the loose sketches, and being able to read the complete poem is a gift.

One of the most stunning qualities about that mural is its controlled color palette; black and white, in an area where there are neon lights, animated LED signs, and not a lot of graphic design. Powers says it represents, ‘. . . night and day; film noir; and of course, the newspaper. They not only hold gravitas, they are the color palette of speed and illegal deeds. Five months after we painted the garage, black and white were chosen as the colors of the Brooklyn Nets”.

Compare Powers’s statement with Brett Yormark, Brooklyn Nets CEO’s, rather vague reasoning for the Nets color scheme: “Our black and white colors speak to Brooklyn’s strong traditions and grittiness and convey an uncompromising confidence (source: www.nba.com).” The mural and the Brooklyn Nets’s Barclay stadium are less than a mile apart, and share a sans-serif type treatment. The likeness is a little uncanny.

A Love Letter to the City is a design monograph, one that is told in a conversational ramble without pretense. There are thumbnail sketches of massive murals, collaborators, paid and unpaid, projects, also paid and unpaid, and clients who don’t always know what they want until they get it. This all may seem familiar to graphic designers; just on a grander scale.

*Powers’s lettering can be found on the David Byrne and St. Vincent collaboration Love this Giant, JJ Doom’s Key the to Kuffs, and Kurt Vile’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze.

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/stephen-powers-a-love-letter-to-the-city/feed/012 Useful Websites Where Designers Can Download Free Stock Photoshttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/12-useful-websites-free-stock-photos/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/12-useful-websites-free-stock-photos/#commentsWed, 19 Mar 2014 09:32:58 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=11837On the other hand, some projects have such limited budgets that they cannot cover the price of stock photos. Those include personal projects and pilot projects. In these low-payment or no-payment projects, another route should be taken to find resources for the design project. Yes, it is the free route. There are many websites that provide free stock photos with different license plans. For example, some websites allow use of stock photos for both personal and commercial projects, while others restrict the usage to only personal projects.

When you search for a free stock photo website, there are a number of factors that you can use to filter the results, such as:

Image Quality

The size and resolution of the images are very important factors for use in projects such as printing and video production. Some websites limit the free download to only small photos, which limits the usage of the image to only web designs.

Usage license

As we mentioned already, some websites limit free stock photo usage to personal use. So it is very important to review the license for the image before downloading it.

Professional photos

Some websites provide numerous images for free download, but they are useless in real life because their composition is such low quality.

I admit that searching for free and professional photos is very challenging because most of the professional photographers prefer to sell their photos to sites such as iStockphotos or Shutterstock. But you can still find good options on the free sites. Therefore, having a list of free stock photography websites can increase the odds of finding not only what you’re looking for but also a professional composition and large size.

The following list includes a number of websites that provide free stock photos for free download. Check it out and share with us your feedback about these sites. Which one do you think is the most useful?

This website provides free stock photos that you can download after registering on the website. The images are available in large dimensions. The Freerangestock interface is very similar to professional stock photography websites, which makes it more usable and easy to navigate through.

The homepage of this website is very minimal, and you can click on the Free Images link to go to its archive page. That page allows you to search for free stock photos from its archive or find images on other paid resources, such as iStockphoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime, and more.

Photo Pin is one of the most useful search tools for free images that you can use either personally or commercially. The site fetches the free images you’re searching for and allows you to download them as long as you add a copyright reference to the photographer.

This is another image search engine similar to Photo Pin, and it lets you search for images through a number of sites that contain free images, such as Flickr. You can click on the image to find the available sizes and license information.

Stockvault is one of the great resources that lets you search for images and download in high resolution without the need to register on the site. You need to check the image usage guidelines, however, because some images are not allowed in commercial projects.

Similar to the Freerangestock website, Pixabay requires registration in order to download free images. When you navigate to any of the images and click the download link, you will see a range of resolutions based on your needs. The resolutions vary from image to image.

Freeimages provides categorization for images, which allows you to search for free stock photos based on a specific category you need. It does not provide a range of resolutions to select from, so you simply obtain the image by clicking on its thumbnail.

The interface of Freedigitalphotos is not as clear as many of the sites above but you can still find it easy to search and find free images to download. The images provided are usually small in size and can be used for the web or be embedded in your design work.

Stock.xchng is one of the most commonly known websites for free photos. All you need to do is register for a free account and start downloading images. The only concern about Stock.xchng is that the images are not professional, and it is hard to find a suitable photo for some projects.

Photl allows you to search for images and either download a low-resolution version for free or buy a high-resolution version of the chosen image. When you choose the large size for download, you may experience slow download speeds.

Rgbstock is another free image website that requires registration in order to download photos. The image sizes are large enough to use in various projects.

In addition to the above list, there are other websites that also provide free images:

• Imageafter
• Freemediagoo
• Placekitten
• Lorempixel

If you find other free image resources that you think can be useful for designers, share them with us in the comments below.

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/12-useful-websites-free-stock-photos/feed/3Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Designhttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/go-a-kidds-guide-to-graphic-design/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/go-a-kidds-guide-to-graphic-design/#commentsSat, 12 Oct 2013 22:20:19 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=10889And keeping with tradition, he says that he’s designed over a thousand jackets in Go’s introduction. There are some designers who may be disappointed that Go is written for children, but while the book is written on a fourth grade level, it’s not lacking information.

Absolutely no space is wasted—even the copyright page is used to explain the history of the copyright symbol. And every page has Kidd’s wit and verve: “Congratulations, you have decided to open this book, even though you have no idea what it’s about . . .”

At first, skimming over the text, I wondered if the book was just a little too wordy for kids. It might be, and that’s fine: kids are smarter than they’re given credit, and when you read Go from its inside cover to its last page, you can see a dialogue that starts off very small and dramatically builds, the way books should. You won’t find the vastly overused “How to Use This Book” (and good riddance).

After going over some brief history, Go’s first chapter is a discussion of form “simply what things look like,” which is so simple it may stop many designers in their tracks. We’re inundated with trend reports, photoshop tutorials, rebrands, but yeah, come to think about it, what this is all about is what things look like. Things that look clean, dirty, cracked, smooth, fuzzy, complicated, that’s our first impression of graphic design.

Anthemic to Kidd’s own design work is the “Big and Small” trick that he shows in Go, where he presents a small comic panel, blows it up to the size of the page, and then reduces it back to its regular size, as if by magic. He presents a spread of typefaces, and talks about their origins. He talks about the design of you, the reader, how names and identities are important.

But moving beyond the basics of design, there are Kidd’s observations: he presents an entire page of razor blade wrappers from the 1950s, each different, because it “shows that many different color schemes and typographic styles can coexist in a way that can please the eye without confusing it . . . This proves that sometimes in advertising beautiful form is enough”.

Some of the activities in the final section of the book are activities that any designer should try: starting a graphic design scrapbook; redesigning something that you love; and most meaningful, designing a logo for a cause you believe in. Some of these exercises by readers will be posted on the book’s Tumblr page.

If the book has a weakness, it’s where Kidd talks about his own career. He starts with the Jurassic Park jacket, Kidd’s most widely seen work, but it’s not necessarily one that a younger audience will be familiar with. And yet it is a design that has been seen on lunch boxes, stationary, t-shirts, and tattoos—both temporary and the kind people die with.

John Madere

Then he displays twenty or so other of his book covers, but they’re presented as a seamless collage and not as individual books. Why? If someone hasn’t seen them before, it’s hard to know that these are individual books. When he displays his jacket for Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, it is very hard to show how elegant it looks when it’s wrapped around a book.

No matter: what’s really exciting about Go isn’t just that we have another book from Chip Kidd, it’s the new designers that Go will no doubt inspire.

Described on the back cover as a “comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of user interface (UI) design,” “Digital Design Essentials” does not disappoint. Through 100 annotated examples, each accompanied by concise design guidelines and best practices; alongside supplemental case studies, Lal distills complex information into easily digestible parts.

Unlike other texts, which may be too technical for new comers to UI or potentially overwhelm a reader with too many examples, Digital Design Essentials features a clearly curated representational cross section of UI challenges and solutions.

Organized by interface with visual examples in each category accompanied by a summary, notes on best practices, design guidelines and user experience along with cross references “Digital Design Essentials” is structured to be easily navigable—equally lending itself to being a quick reference on the job or in the classroom. Much like Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” and Josh Clark’s “Tapworthy,” Raj Lal’s “Digital Design Essentials” is sure to be a staple on my top recommended design books list.

Lal kindly answered some questions for me and our readers about the book.

Raj Lal: In my last 15 years in the software industry, I have worked on desktop software, web applications, and mobile apps. That experience became the foundation for my book on design guidelines. I first researched desktop applications how they began with windows, icon, menu, and pointer (WIMP)-based interfaces, which evolved into graphical user interfaces (GUI). To start the book, I used some simple examples, like Notepad, Photo Editor, and Setup Wizard, to stress the design principles applied in their development that made them successful as well as useful.

I discussed their key design elements and how they served a specific purpose very well. Then I moved to complex applications like integrated development environment (IDE), media player, instant messaging, chat, and dashboard applications. I chose some of the most popular examples of these to illustrate the underlying design pattern that is essential for a developer to understand. Then I covered more advanced user interfaces and current trends in desktop applications like interactive voice response systems, direct user interfaces, 3-D user interfaces, and the currently popular Metro UI and Skeuomorphic design. The examples reinforced the basic philosophy behind the user interface design and gave me the opportunity to discuss the architecture, design guidelines, best practices, and tips for a better user experience.

When choosing applications to illustrate Web design guidelines, I looked for examples that showed the correct interaction designs. The Web has become the biggest medium for communication and interaction. So the examples start with basic Web user interface guidelines, like how to get the key design elements right for a homepage design, personal website, blogger template, wordpress theme, knowledge base, wiki, etc. and progress to more complex applications like online commerce, shopping carts, user accounts, online forums, and sitemaps. These are required by the majority of the websites out there, and the book provides a set of standard guidelines for web designers to follow when designing them. The essentials were chosen to give the “big picture” view as well as to categorize design elements in these types of applications to help designers understand how they work.

Designers are experts in how websites will look, so this additional knowledge would make designers very powerful. The third section is about mobile apps. Working in the mobile industry for the last five years, I have contributed to a number of similar apps. As a result of having designed, developed, and written mobile apps, I became quite familiar with the different design guidelines that they required. For the book, I chose examples that represented the scope of the mobile app landscape: hybrid apps; mobile websites; apps for information, utility, lifestyle, etc.; address books; camera apps; photo apps; and mobile games, which are very important to understand because of their popularity. Then I discussed advanced apps like location-aware apps, apps for consumer service, augmented reality, Bluetooth, and near-field communication (NFC).

I also covered design guidelines for mobile ads, mobile commerce, search, and mobile home screens. The section on touch-based interfaces includes examples for capacitive touch as well as resistive touch namely, touch, multi-touch, accessible touch, gesture-based, and pen-based interfaces. The last section covers advanced categories like a 10-foot user interface for TVs and game console UI designs. Natural user interfaces create interaction based on the everyday behavior of users; natural language interfaces use spoken language to create interaction; intelligent user interfaces learn and adapt to user interactions and communicate in a friendly, human way; and finally, organic user interfaces that accept physical objects and shapes as input.

To sum up, I tried to present a variety of popular and successful examples to cover the complete landscape of user interfaces. My goal was to make life easier for a designer by creating a complete reference for user interface design.

Q. Who do you think will most benefit from the book (i.e., experienced designer vs. novice)?

Raj Lal: The book covers an amazing line of design and organizes the software from past to present and from simple to complex. It is meant for advanced designers, but beginners will also find value in reading the book. One user, Xu Cui, reviewed the book as follows: “While I have worked on a few websites and desktop products, I know little about design. This book contains rich contents with 100 simple and elegant examples from command line to modern mobile UI. With each example, the author provides practical tips. I feel I have become an expert after reading the book.” So although the book covers very advanced examples, it seems that beginners are benefiting more from reading it.

Q. Digital Design Essentials appears to be written very much as a “quick reference guide”—how do you envision it being used “on the job,” so to speak?

Raj Lal: Today’s designers don’t need to read a chapter to understand the application they are designing. They have better things to do. The book takes a completely fat-free approach to UI design, giving the reader everything he or she needs to know in two pages. It cannot get any better than this. In fact, when I was writing the book, each example covered five to six pages. We edited and re-edited, retaining only the most essential and difficult-to-grasp information. The book will give the reader an instant boost in understanding. Imagine you get a task to design an NFC app or a multi-touch app where do you start?

Right now, the only way to understand this is by looking at other similar applications, but that does not give you the architecture, or the background story, or even the design guidelines. There are no guidelines to explain why a touch app uses a particular gesture. Right now, a lot of designers have no choice other than copying the app design from another phone app without understanding the power and the limitations of the technology. The only option is to read about the topic comprehensively. Who has the time to do that? This book will open the eyes of designers to the mechanics behind each of these applications. This will allow them to create very useful and powerful designs.

Q. There’s been some discussion about the move away from skeuomorphic design, with one TechCrunch article calling skeuomorphism a “red-headed step child.” What are your thoughts on this—especially in terms of best practices cited in the book?

Raj Lal: If you read the book, you will understand how skeuomorphic design creates a powerful emotional impact on the user. When you see an old design in the new trend, the experience is very personal, delightful, and friendly. Old and known designs are accepted much more easily, and there is no learning curve there. But this familiarity comes with baggage. It goes against the simple design principle that says each design element needs to serve a purpose. It needs more work, which can be deemed unnecessary. The book also shows Microsoft’s Metro UI, which is the opposite of skeuomorphic design, and lists design guidelines, best practices, and tips to ensure a better user experience.

There is no right or wrong answer. Modern user interfaces favor the minimalistic design that is used in Microsoft platforms, Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Tablets. They have great potential, but would you call them successful yet? In the article in which he calls Skeuomorphic a “red-headed step child,” Anthony Ha pointed out correctly that the iOS 7 design seems to be moving away from traditional skeuomorphic design to minimalistic design. I think this decision might have been made because of the small real estate in a mobile screen. iOS design is dictated by the needs of iPhone users.

For a small-sized screen, minimalistic design makes more sense, because it displays the information better. Moreover, since the design has to transfer to iPad and so on, there can be only one design. But the importance of Skeuomorphic design cannot be ignored. Apple iPhone and iPad designs are very successful with their current design. What the change will bring, only time can tell.

Q. Are there any trends you see emerging on the horizon in digital design?

Raj Lal: The current trend is one interface for any kind of glass that displays information, be that viewed on a desktop screen, the Web, a mobile device, or a tablet. There are two distinct patterns that are trending in the user interface arena: one is 10-foot user interfaces for designing TV apps, which might be the next big revolution in UI design, and the second is user interfaces for wearable technology like Google Glass or the rumored iWatch.

The other big potential area is organic user interfaces. With Microsoft Kinect, for example, there is no more remote control; the human body is the input to the game console. The possibilities here are endless. In organic user interfaces, we are just scratching the surface. Check out Leapmotion for an amazing example of an organic user interface. These new technologies will need their own kind of user interfaces, and the only limitation is your imagination. The future does look bright for UI designers!

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/digital-design-essentials-review-raj-lal/feed/1Aesthetics: A Memoir – Ivan Brunettihttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/aesthetics-a-memoir-ivan-brunetti/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/aesthetics-a-memoir-ivan-brunetti/#commentsTue, 13 Aug 2013 02:56:44 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=10569In four paragraphs, and in a book about cartooning, Brunetti then carefully detailed how to properly prepare spaghetti aglio e oglio. It tells you a lot about Ivan Brunetti; his Italian heritage, his belief in technique and form, his appreciation of simplicity.

Above all, that last part is what makes Brunetti as much a graphic designer as a cartoonist. As he notes in the introduction to Aesthetics, his latest book, in his native Italian, “The word disegno literally meant drawing, but also design. Thus the two were forever fused in my mind”.

Brunetti’s own cartoons as of late have been button-cute characters with noodle arms (possibly spaghetti) who have an incredible sense of motion and purpose. Like the best cartoons, you can tell instantly if they’ve had a bad day, an idea, or if they’re afraid of something.

They’re the perfect cartoons for the era of the smart phone or the tablet computer — cartoons that are like bright and colorful icons that can be recognized from far away. You might have seen his work on various New Yorker covers or in comics anthologies such as Kramer’s Ergot. But mostly, Brunetti now focuses on teaching illustration and comics at the University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago.

64 Cartoon Characters by Ivan Brunetti.

Brunetti’s retrospective, Aesthetics: A Memoir is a small volume of collected sketches, comic strips, album covers, posters, and even sculptures, as well as photographs of Brunetti’s collections of old photographs, toys, and bric-a-brac. It’s a view of his process, his inspirations, and personal projects, to look at it is to understand clutter as inspiration. My favorite Brunetti cartoons are the ones that are the most cluttered, like his New Yorker cover that depicts an office as an endless grid of germs and frustration (and occasional contentment), or his Halloween party that shows the interplay of various halloween costumes. Both of these illustrations are messy concepts, and yet they’re both so endearingly cute. And the composition is so clean that you want to keep staring and find all the narratives.

Throughout his memoir, Brunetti draws upon his teaching background to advise the reader. Noting a perspective problem for a New Yorker cover he says “My credo: If you know you can’t do something right, then do it as wrong as possible.” In a caption for a Marvel comics cover, he remarks on how proud his 10-year old self would be of the 43 year old who drew the cover, “Some advice to the discouraged: hold onto your dreams, eventually reality will bend to your will.” But my favorite bit of advice is when you’re stuck, or “miserably depressed, devoid of confidence and hope . . . make a quick, funny drawing as a gift for a little kid.” I’ve tried this and it totally works.

Aesthetics: A Memoir Cover by Ivan Brunetti

Brunetti is often disparaging and critical about his own career and importance, which is often humorous and endearing, but it also seems unnecessary. In a moment of self-criticism, he places two versions of the same cartoon (a monologue from Louise Brooks about her life), in black and white on one side, and color on the other. In a typical self-effacing style, he says that while he once tried to hide “spatial and anatomical deficiencies” by adding color. Now he reflects, “the color seems to me an unnecessary adornment, an act of cowardice.” But really the fact that the cartoon can be easily read both in black and white and in color is proof of Brunetti’s strong sense of composition.

Brunetti experiments heavily with repetition, trying to recreate the same face hundreds of times, as part of a way to break creative blocks, and to gain a more meditative state. He includes some of these drawings, which are as mesmerizing to look at as they must have been to create.

96 Heads by Ivan Brunetti.

There are sculptures, dioramas, paint-chip tesselations, gocco-prints, plans for a moving sculpture — inspirations abound throughout Brunetti’s book. But the real surprise for those familiar with his work may be Brunetti’s posters, which have a voice all their own. A purple elephant on a pink poster for “The Show and Tell Show” has Brunetti’s sense of geometry (the circles) and type, but it’s incredibly bright and happy, with no sense of misfortune. The graphics on his 2012 Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation poster can’t be seen all at once but have to be “read” left to right, in a clever use of angles and abstraction.

There’s a photograph underneath the jacket, of Brunetti gazing down at a tiny illustration desk, with crumpled pieces of paper in a tiny waste paper basket. It’s a wonderful interpretation of seeing the cartoon medium as a smaller world that we get to visit; it’s also sadly evocative of Brunetti’s own struggles with making illustrations.

His sight has been declining steadily, making work very difficult, so his own desk is getting further and further away from him. Skill, muscle memory, and persistence are what continue to bring his work forward. Perhaps that’s because cartoons aren’t just illustrations; as Brunetti describes drawing, “every line is an ideology.”

Readers who want a better sense of Brunetti’s work can view a trailer here.

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/aesthetics-a-memoir-ivan-brunetti/feed/1The Graphic Designer’s Business Survival Guidehttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/graphic-designers-business-guide/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/graphic-designers-business-guide/#commentsWed, 19 Jun 2013 02:56:18 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=10168The truth be told, there are loads of very talented designers out there competing against one another. But, it takes more than graphic design talent to be successful. It also requires the core business and managerial skills all small businesses need to master to be successful.

That means a balancing act of wearing many hats including office manager; sales person; bookkeeper; human resources manager; janitor; chief cook and bottle washer, as well as graphic design. It tends to be those who master this art of hat wearing who are successful in the long run.

Not only does the book come jam-packed with Daniels’ business savvy learned along a career spanning almost 40 years, the author also shares many of his firm’s business forms, as well as insights from seasoned graphic designers and entrepreneurs. Those alone are worth the price of admission.

Daniels provides proven tips, techniques and the business know-how that comes from years of experience. Manning the helm of his business, DanielsDesignConsultants, he’s honed his business practices into a workable and repeatable series of systems and graciously shares them with readers.

Beyond this, within the pages of The Graphic Designer’s Business Survival Guide readers will get a sense that Daniels, like a sage mentor, is looking over their shoulder helping to ensure they don’t fall prey to common business traps.

Readers will also learn how to move out of the freelance feast or famine syndrome and into the position of valued consultant. The Graphic Designer’s Business Survival Guide shows readers how to develop a business mindset, enhance their communication with their clients and build solid relationships. Readers will also come away with new skills for conducting prospect research, crafting spot-on proposals and presentations and making design decisions that are based on facts and truly serve the client.

Whether they have limited experience in the industry or are a well-seasoned pro The Graphic Designer’s Business Survival Guide provides designers at all levels with a handy resource to help them solve their business problems, or simply start off with their best foot forward. Tapping into Daniels’ advice, graphic designers can build their businesses in an effective, sensible manner.

Sure, there will always be challenges, but the business of graphic design becomes a lot easier and less stressful when the owner has the business smarts to ensure food in their stomach and a roof over their head. With a copy of The Graphic Designer’s Business Survival Guide in hand, a graphic designer will be well on their way toward a successful and rewarding career.

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/graphic-designers-business-guide/feed/0Is Your Head in the Cloud?http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/is-your-head-in-the-cloud/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/is-your-head-in-the-cloud/#commentsThu, 23 May 2013 21:33:44 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=10096Adobe offers a variety of subscription levels for Creative Cloud. The 30-day free trial provides 2GB of storage, but allows for only limited access to the array of applications. Its standard $49.99 US/month “Complete Individual” subscription provides full versions of Adobe® Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Acrobat®, and more, along with full access to services to help subscribers create mobile-ready content and apps; 20GB of cloud storage for file sharing and collaboration.

It does, however, require an annual commitment that is billed monthly. The company also offers pricing levels for students and teachers, single application only, team pricing and discounts for users of CS 3 or later.

So, what are the benefits to this head in the cloud quandary?

For Adobe, this certainly works well. Subscriptions are a much more predictable source of recurring revenue.

For users, it’s handy. You can access your files across a myriad of devices from your desktop system to your laptop, tablet or your phone. Collaboration and sharing seem pretty straight-forward and easy, even if your clients don’t have Creative Cloud or know what the heck it is. Updates are built-in, if you choose to update. Creative Cloud has Behance integration and a subscription comes with the pro features of Behance, including ProSite — a fully customizable professional portfolio with your own unique URL. Adobe also offers product support and a library of video tutorials. Creative Cloud for teams also includes another level of support. Each member of a team gets two one-on-one sessions with an Adobe product expert per year.

Still, there are many concerns for a lot of people. Probably the biggest concerns are needing to be connected to the Web to use the software and working on your files in a browser. Adobe says those are common misunderstandings. The applications live on your hard drive, not in the cloud. They are installed just like any other application. And, although you do need to connect once per month to verify your subscription, being connected isn’t required to use an application. Being connected most likely isn’t an issue for many graphic designers, anyway. If you’re at all like me, and I suspect you are, you pretty much live on the ‘Net’.

Nonetheless, there will probably come a time, usually the worst time possible, when your connection goes down for this reason or that. It’s part of Murphy’s Law and akin to your hard drive spinning its last right at deadline time.

Another concern is not owning a real physical disk(s). Having something to hold in your hand or spill coffee on is reassuring. But, when it comes to Adobe products, or most software for that matter, you never really owned them. You simply licensed the right to use it on your system.

What about deciding to jump ship after working with Creative Cloud? What happens to your files and all your hard work? It’s still yours and you can open them with a previous version. The caveat is remembering to save the file down to a compatible version. As you likely know, Adobe isn’t really big on backward compatibility, but it can be done.

Then, there’re are always instability issues and bugs to deal with, such as Adobe needing to take down it’s sync feature a few days ago. The company provides system status updates where users can check on how healthy Creative Cloud is at any time.

Many new graphic designers, as well as some veterans and, of course, students aren’t known for being on the affluent list. For freelancers and others, adding yet another item to the monthly budget isn’t all that appealing. That was pretty apparent in a CNET and Jefferies & Co. survey from last year. The companies conducted a follow-up survey which showed users are getting a bit more used to the idea of digging into their pockets on a monthly basis.

For the cash-strapped and rebels out there, there are other options. Gimp, for example, is an open source (read: free) Photoshop clone of sorts. Inkscape is a lot like Illustrator and Scribus is similar to InDesign. Odds are, these aren’t perfect solutions and there are some compatibility issues. Scribus can’t open InDesign files natively, but you can save an InDesign file as postscript to get it into Scribus.

At the end of the day, it’s every Abode Creative Suite user to decide whether or not to jump onto the cloud. It’s the way things are going and it’s not likely to change. The world around us is moving and changing at break neck speed. Do your homework, learn as much as you can and make an informed decision for your particular needs and situation.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
~ George Bernard Shaw

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/is-your-head-in-the-cloud/feed/0The Art of the Ambigram: An Interview with Nikita Prokhorovhttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/art-of-ambigram-nikita-prokhorov/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/art-of-ambigram-nikita-prokhorov/#commentsThu, 21 Mar 2013 03:45:56 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=9765For the uninformed, an ambigram is a word, art form or other symbolic representation, whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation. There are various forms of ambigrams including rotational, mirror-image, chain, symbiotograms, 3-D and perceptual shift among others.

The earliest known non-natural ambigram dates back to 1893 in works created by artist Peter Newell. Newell published two books of invertible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when turned upside down.

Although they’ve been around for quite some time, Dan Brown gave ambigrams a serious shot in the popularity arm with his novel Angels & Demons. Commercially, they’ve been used by Raymond Loewy who designed the rotational New Man ambigram logo, Paul McCartney’s album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and the Princess Bride 20th Anniversary Edition DVD cover designed by Menagerie Creative along with many more.

The author also shares a series of case studies complete with sketches and the thought process behind the creation of some remarkable ambigrams. The showcase section of Ambigrams Revealed presents numerous examples from ambigramists around the world.

So, how does one find his way into this unusual design disciple? I caught up with Nikita to find out and also get some more background on his new book.

What led you to a career in graphic design?

NP: My career in graphic design began with a spectacular failure as a programmer. If any computer programmers are reading this interview, they’ll know that one of the first programs you have to write in a C++ or Java class is one that displays “Hello World!” on the screen. I couldn’t even get that to work correctly! Once I factored in my love for drawing and my grandfather’s influence (who was an architect and artist), the choice to pursue graphic design was pretty clear.

Was there a teacher or teachers who helped shape your work in design?

NP: As an undergraduate, I had a teacher who was in the habit of correcting students’ work with a red sharpie. Usually my sketches, and sometimes even final projects, were full of red marks! She was one of the few professors who pushed me further than anyone else and helped shape my design thinking early on. On the upside, if she was happy with the work, all she drew was a little red heart: I got the red heart a few times.

During one of my first graduate courses in SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), I butted heads with the professor more times than I can remember. Yet, she made me realize that my work was very average and I had to think and work differently if I was to succeed as a graphic designer. To this day, I think her class made the most impact on my creative & conceptual thinking. There were several other professors in graduate school whose work and dedication I admired, and they influenced and inspired my thinking and work ethic.

What are the particular types of projects you enjoy (print, identity, Web, lettering, etc.)

NP: My forte is identity and lettering. However, I never had an interest in ambigrams or lettering (beyond traditional typography) until I finished graduate school. I stumbled across some lettering work by artists such as Doyald Young and Gerard Huerta, and I became hooked. They were my early inspiration, especially when you consider that Gerard Huerta created the logo for my favorite band, AC/DC.

You’re a founding partner in CINQ, a design group handling a variety of projects for various clients. Please describe CINQ’s work and client relationships.

NP: There are two other partners at CINQ, and we all bring something different to the table. Our focus is on small to mid-size businesses and non-profit organizations. The relationships that we try to build with our clients go far beyond the digital realm: this includes phone calls, Skype, and face-to-face meetings whenever possible. Coming across as personable, approachable and fun can’t be done via email alone, and we like to keep in touch with clients after the project is done, aside from the traditional post-project follow-ups.

As for the personal Nikita, you seem to have a penchant for jumping out of airplanes. What got you into that?

NP: Can you believe that work-related stress caused me to jump out of a plane? I was teaching college level graphic design at the time, and it was a very difficult semester for everyone in the department. After one particularly stressful class, I walked outside into the courtyard next to the design building, and I was thinking of what I could do to take the edge off. I looked up at the sky, remembered that I did two tandem jumps several years before…and within a week I was signed up and on my way to getting my solo license. I am now a B-licensed skydiver with approximately 150 jumps, which isn’t much in five years, but I’ll take what I can get.

Many designers listen to music while they work. Is that the case for you and, if so, what artists do you listen to?

NP: It really depends on the project. If I am doing production work or website updates, I prefer something melodic and monotonous, such as house music. Classical music is perfect for when I need to come up with various concepts and brainstorm. But my go-to music is anything by AC/DC. It’s perfect for any occasion, even weddings!

You have a focus on lettering, in particular, ambigrams. They’re not exactly the easiest design project to tackle. What brought you to that unusual discipline?

NP: As many ambigram artists nowadays, I saw John Langdon’s ambigram work in Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons. After seeing the first ambigram maybe ten or so pages into the book, I couldn’t continue reading. I had to pick up a pencil and start sketching to try to figure out how it worked. It took me a bit of time to come up with my first ambigram, but it was well worth the artistic struggles I faced.

What is your process for designing ambigrams?

NP: If I have a specific word in mind, I usually sketch it out and try to make it legible and readable without any color, texture, additional illustrative elements, etc. I try to focus on just legibility and readability first. Once I’ve achieved that, then I turn to typographic style, colors, and texture.
Ambigrams convey a certain aspect of illusion, but they are not magic. An ambigram is a puzzle with malleable pieces and multiple solutions. A traditional jigsaw puzzle has a set number of pieces that you assemble into a predetermined solution: Neither the puzzle pieces nor the final solution offer flexibility. But an ambigram has an undetermined number of typographic elements that you can shape and morph as you see fit for the best possible outcome.

This is where the essence of the ambigram development process becomes clear. The exploration process guides how those typographic pieces will develop. Therefore, the perception of the final solution that you had at the start of the design process will change as well. It is nearly impossible to predict where the process will take you. As an ambigram designer, you are not just crafting new letters. You are establishing new relationships through existing letters. Each of those letters consists of a shape and meaning you learn from an early age. When you’re crafting those new relationships, you have to take special care to preserve the original meaning.

Your new book, Ambigrams Revealed, promises to be an engaging, must-have for a graphic designer’s library. What led you to writing it?

NP: I have been writing and managing Ambigram.com for about four years. Throughout that time, I got to know the ambigram community fairly well and realized how widespread and diverse we were.

Several ambigram pioneers (John Langdon, Scott Kim, and Douglas Hofstadter) have published individual ambigram books of their own, but there has never been a book of international ambigram work. Burkard Polster published a wonderful book Eye Twisters: Ambigrams & Other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain, but it wasn’t dedicated solely to ambigrams. The combination of my research and writing for Ambigram.com morphed into the idea of Ambigrams Revealed, an international publication of ambigrams, with a respected panel of judges to comment on the work, case studies of outstanding ambigrams, and a gallery of stunning work from every corner of the world. Approximately 60% of the participants are from outside of the United States, and it reflects the diversity and the far reach of the ambigram as an art form.

...An ambigram takes on the same sort of life that a symbol does by connecting to nature, but how does it become its own entity, and such a visually lively one at that? To uncover that, you need to look at both parts of the ambigram: the word and the universal principle expressed. Although the written word is the most apparent component of the ambigram, you intuitively process visual information before you intellectually understand it…”

Please describe what readers can expect from the book and, perhaps, some key points they can take away after reading it.

NP: I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone can take away something from this book. If you are a graphic designer, you’ll marvel at the creativity demonstrated in the book, and will appreciate it from a typographic, as well as a design viewpoint. If you’re an ambigram designer, your Pavlovian reflex will kick in as you look at all the beautiful ambigram work. And if you’ve never heard of ambigrams before, you will definitely know what they are after you finish the book. Most importantly, I know that anyone who reads this book will attempt to create an ambigram long before they get to the last page.

When is Ambigrams Revealed due to hit the bookshelves?

NP: It will be available on March 29th, 2013, on Peachpit’s website and other online booksellers. As for actual book stores, you’ll be able to order it through most individual bookstores, but it may be easier to just purchase it online. The book will be available in both print (softcover) and ebook editions.

Nikita is currently developing an ambigram workshop for various universities and design organizations. He also has plans to develop an online version of the same workshop.

Ambigrams Revealed is an obvious labor of love and passion. “Over the years, ambigrams have become an artistic addiction, which I’ve pursued relentlessly,” said Nikita. He added, “The process of developing the idea for the book, pitching it to various publishers, getting it accepted, and actually designing it has been an incredible learning experience that I would recommend to everyone. In the end, it paid off: not in the monetary sense, but in the sense of artistic, professional and personal fulfillment, as well as seeing a project that’s very close to your heart come to life.”

End Of The World | This was created as an artistic response to the Mayan Calendar prediction for the end of the world in 2012. I’m glad that everyone lived to fight another day.

Elizabeth | Created for a friend of mine as a gift.

One Love | Created as an homage to Bob Marley and the Rastafarian way of life.

Dracula | Created for fun after watching Leslie Nielsen’s portrayal of Dracula.

Infinite | This is an example where I tried to portray the meaning of the word as well rather than just turn it into an ambigram. This is a rotational chain ambigram: when you turn the chain 180 degrees, it reads as ‘infinite.’ However, note that it’s not a direct rotation: the center of the word shifts when you rotate it, so that the ‘infinite’ upside down begins in the middle of ‘infinite’ that you see initially. Hopefully that makes sense!

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/art-of-ambigram-nikita-prokhorov/feed/0Sign Painters by Faythe Levine, Ed Ruscha and Sam Macon – A Reviewhttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/sign-painters/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/sign-painters/#commentsTue, 04 Dec 2012 22:44:58 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=9269“It’s not science, but it’s beautiful and all artists recognize this” says Ed Ruscha in his forward to Sign Painters, a book about hand painted signs and the people who create them. And yet sign painting must be a science—the spacing, the embellishments, brushwork, the fluidity of the type. Hand painted signs were once just signs, but now in an era of Photoshop and Illustrator, they’re something else—they’re a mark that says that someone cared enough to get something special designed for their business.

That’s one of the surprises about the book; it’s not overly nostalgic because sign painting is something that is going on now. There’s a priceless photo of a painter completing the lettering on a notice for a coffee shop. It reads, “The Cell Phone Booth is Out Side”, with an illustration of a streetlamp, and an arrow pointing to it. The charm isn’t just the commentary on technology—the fact that the hand-painted sign is now more common than a phone booth is funny, sure but what takes it beyond just a little joke is the sign’s quality.

The type is crisp, the color palette is subtle and inviting, the words are spaced so that they’re easy on the eyes, and you’re almost tricked into reading it. If you didn’t know English, you would look at it anyway because it’s an attractive message, and it’s a welcome respite from the angry all-cap messages from baristas and store clerks, penned in Sharpie, which decidedly lack any nuance.

Sean Barton’s “The Cell Phone Booth Is Outside.”

The format of Sign Painters—brief first-person essays with the artists, combined with photos of signs that can take your breath away—is a bit of a surprise. Interviews with sign painters means that with every column of type, you’re missing out on another great photo. And sometimes the voice of the painter is just not as interesting or well-spoken as their work.

But when painter Ernie Gosnell says, “I’ve got brushes I’ve had for forty years that I still use,” or Bob Dewhurst talks about showing up “in a town on a Greyhound bus, sleep in a field, and be painting a sign the next day,” or you read the story of a former stock broker who decided to become a sign painting apprentice, there’s a better sense of what this trade is all about—determination and a little bit of craziness. And then there’s the story about how a sign-feud between two competing sign-painters was resolved, which shockingly doesn’t happen in the 30’s or 40’s—it’s in 1996.

The two authors, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon have been working on a documentary about the practice of sign painting, and while the film has not yet been released, this book seems like the perfect companion piece.

Look to the Moon, by Caitlyn Galloway.

There’s something about the text that goes beyond just talking about aesthetics. Sign painter Sean Starr addresses just what people might find so appealing about a hand painted sign: “People have become conditioned by uniformity. When corporate America started taking over and steamrolling everything, we became and more disconnected.”

It’s important to keep things in perspective. I don’t want to read too much into the beauty of a gold-gilded glass sign, or imagine that a hand-lettered marquee for a movie theatre is going to connect people more than one that was designed in Photoshop or Illustrator. I don’t want to, but I do.

The book is beautifully executed—full color, with hand type illustrating the [each] chapter. And there’s a charming excerpt of a Wagner’s Blue Print Text Book of Sign and Show Card Lettering that concludes the text. It shows diagrams of letter forms, brush specs and typography treatments. The message is clear: get to work.

]]>http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/sign-painters/feed/0Squarespace 6: Beautiful, Flexible Websites Made Easyhttp://www.graphicdesign.com/article/squarespace-6-flexible-websites/
http://www.graphicdesign.com/article/squarespace-6-flexible-websites/#commentsTue, 24 Jul 2012 22:36:56 +0000http://www.graphicdesign.com/?post_type=article&p=7879For designers, bloggers or anyone searching for easy-to-use, yet incredibly sophisticated website creation and hosting, a solution may be in sight. Last Friday Squarespace officially announced the release of Squarespace 6, an extensive overhaul of their previous platform, which adds 50 new features to their core service sure to please even the finickiest critic. Counted among the new features are a highly intuitive, drag n’ drop site-building interface called LayoutEngine which dynamically aligns and resizes content to a perfect grid, social network integration, a new blogging engine that supports easy importing from major blog platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger and Squarespace 5 and built in analytics. A demo video can be viewed here.

There are also 20 new fully customizable templates which users can use “as is” or as a starting point for their own designs. Clearly the minds behind the new release took a comprehensive approach when considering what to include in Squarespace 6, which is chock full of goodies that seem plucked right off a user wish list. We asked Squarespace, “What role user feedback played in the redesign and selecting new features to implement?”

Seine Kim, PR & Communications Manager, Squarespace replied “User feedback played a very active role in the development of Squarespace 6. We culled user feedback from a customer survey as well as from our support team, who interact with Squarespace users 24 hours a day/7 days a week. As a website creation platform that’s been in existence since 2004, we have a deep understanding of the space itself—but the user feedback was very helpful in augmenting that knowledge.”

Features I found most exciting were the automatic layout adjustment for mobile viewing on smart phones and tablets addressing the challenge of designing for various screen sizes and resolutions, Facebook page publishing feature allowing users to seamlessly publish any page or gallery from their Squarespace site directly to Facebook and content syncing from Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, and Dropbox.

Next we asked which features Kim thought users would be most excited about, she said, “Certainly the LayoutEngine—it’s the heart of Squarespace 6. LayoutEngine is a revolutionary new page building technology that allows anyone to create graphically rich, magazine-quality page layouts within the browser that can scale to any screen size. Traditionally, these designs required a high level of programming experience and design expertise—but now, with Squarespace 6, anyone can drag and drop content blocks to create visually engaging content.” Another especially attractive feature for designers are the galleries with built in editing tools.

In response to a question about developers and code savvy folks who want to add or edit code Kim replied “Users on Squarespace 6 can currently add code blocks, use code injection points in the settings, and add your own CSS in the style editor. The developer kit, which will be announced in the coming months, was used to create every website on our platform (including our homepage and templates) will enable developers to control every single line of HTML on a Squarespace site.”

Readers can find a full tour of Squarespace 6 and 14-day free trial on squarespace.com